DataVizards #1 – Share Labs

2017-10-11

We are launching a new series on dataviz.love called DataVizards!

It will consist of short introductions of data visualisation experts and their work. The order in which they will be featured has no relevance.
Also, we don’t plan to be too technical in the descriptions, so hopefully everyone can enjoy.

Our team started looking for people around our base country – Hungary – who work in data visualisation. I scanned through hundreds of Behance pages and did a bunch of Google searches. We then selected a few based on the professional and aesthetic quality of their work. I decided to call them DataVizards (puns are life). The first few entries of the series will be about them.

Now, since this is all very much based on the research and opinion of a single person, I must have missed plenty of people. If you know of someone around Hungary whose dataviz work you adore, please let me know NOW in the comments. Otherwise, just enjoy the posts 🙂

So the first team is going to be…

SHARE LAB – Research & Data Investigation Lab

This Serbia-based team does amazing, detailed analyses paired with stunning visuals. What do I mean by stunning? This:

According to their Twitter bio, they seek to explore the intersections between technology and society which the works featured on their (also beautiful) website prove. I really love that they not only provide the (often grandiose) visualisations but also detailed explanations and interpretations that walk the reader through the data.

Most of their articles employ the same visual style: more-or-less minimalistic, with black and white marks and background. Sometimes you’ll see some colour popping up, but it’s really the exception from the rule. This uniformity gives a very professional impression overall.

Another big plus is their choice of tools both in terms of the software that they employ and the types of vizes.
They aren’t very explicit about which software they use, but I recognised Gephi and Tableau for their basic network and non-network charts. The more advanced visualisations I’d expect were created using d3.js (in some cases probably simply Adobe Illustrator).

Tableau

Gephi

d3?/Illustrator?

Given the complex nature of the topics that they cover, they work with fairly complex charts. You want to read Sankeys, network diagrams and Gantt charts galore? They are your people.

And this brings me to my only point of criticism. I think I’m a seasoned consumer of data insights, but the size and the complexity of the visualizations intimated even me. I like visualisations because they tell me something that is hard to understand when written down in words. With SHARE LAB’s work, however, I wish the charts were printed out on A0 sizes of paper in high-def so I could really understand what is going on. I do believe that this is somewhat intentional but makes the content very hard to consume over a web page.

So what do you think, is this new series something you will enjoy? Let us know in the comments!